A variety of rare and common – and all essential – rock, rap, funk, cult and other incredible LP’s and 45’s from the World’s Greatest Record Collector, Geoffrey Weiss.

Saturday, June 24, 2017, Noon-6 PM

Rappcats
5638 York Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90042
All photos by Eilon Paz, and text by Eothen Alapatt, taken from Dust & Grooves:

There’s one person I’ve met for who I can only use one phrase: Geoffrey Weiss is, to me and to many, the world’s best record collector.

I knew of Geoffrey by the time I moved to Nashville, Tennessee and started trading elbows with those who knew the most progressive from the generation in front of me. If you were a funk or soul collector in the 90s, it didn’t take long before someone like David Forman told you about someone like Barry Wickham who, of course, knew Geoffrey Weiss. I remember the first time I saw Geoffrey, at a backyard barbecue in Echo Park, shortly after I moved to the Eastside of LA in 2001: he had a long beard then, and he might as well have been Gandalf. I was offered an introduction and I declined, as, well, what the hell was I going to talk to the Geoffrey Weiss about? I would just make myself look like an idiot.

Some years later, when I first had the opportunity to hang out with him, I realized that I was wrong about what type of a collector Geoffrey was … What I didn’t realize is that he wasn’t the jaded, braggart type. He is of the most enthusiastic, one of the most gracious, the most trustworthy and the most fearless record collectors. When I saw a copy of one of the world’s great psych 45s – Tintern Abbey’s “Vacumn Cleaner” – sitting in its stock Deram sleeve on a table with a $1000 price tag on it, I remarked to Geoffrey that he was lucky to own it. It was a spare, he told me, and I could have it as part of a trade we were working on. (That particular trade went on for over a year, mind, and was punctuated by many evenings filled with stellar bourbon and interesting beers, evenings whose assigned point – the trade – was moved to the side in favor of the pursuit of knowledge and actual enjoyment from playing and listening to vinyl). When I gasped that he had spent a grand on a spare record – no matter how great – he remarked that the record was better than a grand and shrugged his shoulders.

Those types of stories go on and on with Geoffrey Weiss: he’s not known as a funk or soul collector, but he bought the Marvin Whoremonger and doubles of the Southern University Jazz Ensemble Goes To Africa with Love LP’s in the 80s and 90s because they intrigued him. He’s the guy who pulled the Stephen David Heitkotter LP out of the reject bin at A&M’s publishing division in 1986 and cemented its status as one of America’s great outsider rock albums. Geoffrey doesn’t need validation from another collector or from a guidebook or from the ego of owning the rarest this, or the most expensive that (though his collection is full of those things). Geoffrey does this thing because he loves music that much, and he always has – and he’s done it through years in the major label music industry, working with and for people who would never have his acumen, and now outside of it. Anyone gifted the opportunity to share a moment with him in his space, amongst thousands of albums and 45s that Geoffrey knows intimately, is in for – damn, here I go again – a singular musical experience, from the only person of his kind.